Skepticism

EVENTS

I didn’t watch the Republican National Convention

Sorry. I just can’t bear it. My wife wanted to make the effort, and I grumbled and delayed and finally handed over control of the remote (I had a lecture to write anyway), but I was amused to see she turned it on during Santorum’s speech and only lasted about five minutes…she decided the weather news was far more interesting.

Chris Christie got tapped to make the keynote attack on President Obama, but Rick Santorum was assigned to throw out some of the reddest meat at the GOP convention: about the way Obama supposedly gutted the work requirement for welfare (he didn’t).

And in case anyone was in danger of missing the racial subtext, Santorum linked Obama’s waiving the work requirement (he didn’t) to “his refusal to enforce the immigration law.” Welfare recipients and illegal immigrants, oh my! Santorum made sure to scare the white working class with the depredation of those non-white slackers and moochers. It’s 1972 all over again.

Yeah, Republicans are racist. They ought to just be open about it and call themselves the White People Party.

This whole thing is depressing. It seems like everyone involved, from the media to the pols themselves, has foregone even the appearance of public service. It’s nothing but a game; the score is the only important thing. It’s not about serving your fellow man. It’s not about changing the world (or your little corner of it). It’s only about winning with the score kept in dollars and votes.

Pathetic and disgusting.

The only thing worse is that we let them get away with it. But, the game is rigged so that it takes bloodshed to change it.

It takes a stronger stomach than mine to listen to that stuff. A blank tv screen is far more interesting and much less likely to make me vomit. I managed a few moments of Chris Christie’s drivel – then my irony meter got nuked by this …

You see, I believe we have become paralyzed, paralyzed by our desire to be loved. Now our founding fathers had the wisdom to know that social acceptance and popularity were fleeing, and that this country’s principles needed to be rooted in strengths greater than the passions and the emotions of the times.
But our leaders of today have decided it’s more important to be popular, to say and do what’s easy, and say yes rather than to say no, when no is what is required.

Um – are we still talking about windsock Mitt Romney as some kind of contrast to this ? Righhht. Blah, blah, blah America great again …

We are demanding that our leaders stop tearing each other down and work together to take action on the big things facing America. Tonight, we will do what my mother taught me. Tonight,
we are going to choose respect over love.

Cause, the republican party is all about working together and respect. Just listen to the rest of this speech – it was just full of respect and concrete ideas … oh wait, nope … teachers are evil parasites, nope can’t take it anymore

Two attendees at the Republican National Convention were thrown out of the convention center in Tampa on Tuesday after throwing nuts at a black CNN camerawoman and saying, “this is how we feed the animals.”

CNN reported that multiple witnesses saw it happen, and police immediately removed the two people from the premises.

I strongly suspect that they were merely removed to another room, handed a cold beer, and given a slap on the back with a hearty laugh.

A little off topic, but the white people party thing made me think about the Stuart Lee quote when he’s talking about political correctness – “if political correctness has achieved one thing, it’s to make the Conservative party cloak its inherent racism behind more creative language.”

Yes, that’s right, taxpayers pay to provide a national stage for propaganda that’s not even entertaining. And we pay for the associated booze.

…This is no small bar tab. According to Forbes.com, it comes to a grotesque $87 million for both conventions. That includes $50 million for security costs, and another $18.3 million for political activities at each convention.

“If people knew that the money was being used to pay for liquor (and) parties…they would not be too pleased,” University of South Florida political expert Dr. Seth McKee told Tampa’s local NBC affiliate. Those expenses include “more than $250,000 for social media services, $150,000 for website services, $215,000 for travel, and $42,000 for meetings/catering/beverages.”

Republicans get to add transportation failures to their inability to organize a convention well.

The 10-minute trip from the convention hall to the hotel turned into a dreadful excursion for Republican delegates Tuesday night, with some convention-goers stuck on buses for hours without air conditioning in the Florida heat.

“It was the bus from hell,” says former state Sen. Carlene Walker, a Utah Republican who left the Tampa Bay Times Forum at 11:15 p.m. and walked into the delegation’s hotel around 2:30 a.m. “It was a nightmare.”…

… a confusing transportation network devoid of signs and volunteer guides stumped on which bus was headed where.

Security checkpoints, closed-off streets and bus drivers who wouldn’t let passengers alight from the coach added to the fiasco.

Ah yes, hot and humid and trapped on a bus. See, there are things worse than watching the convention on TV. You could have actually been there.

The 10-minute trip from the convention hall to the hotel turned into a dreadful excursion for Republican delegates Tuesday night, with some convention-goers stuck on buses for hours without air conditioning in the Florida heat.

“If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the women sighing a little bit more than the men. It’s how it is, isn’t it?” Yes, it’s how it still will be in a Mitt Romney presidency. An election cycle in which her husband has declared birth control coverage to be a threat to religious liberty and wants to almost entirely ban abortion is an inconvenient time for her to talk about “that couple who would like to have another child, but wonder how will they afford it.” A convention for a party that opposes any legislation around equal pay for women is an inopportune moment to discuss the “working moms who love their jobs but would like to work just a little less to spend more time with the kids, but that’s just out of the question with this economy.”…

I noticed that single mothers who work and also depend on food aid and medicaid were not mentioned by Ann Romney.

Also, women might be widowed in Ann’s world, but they are never divorced.

The White People’s Party—While the GOP has been for a long time the Rich People’s Party, who are generally White, it clearly became the White People’s Party in 1968 with the GOP/Nixon Southern Strategy. At that time the cover lie was Law and Order…a major theme of the campaign as I recall…code for stop Black’s from “rioting” (i.e. protesting)…and, oh yeah, get those pesky students against the war off the streets (Kent State was 2 years later). Then we would have the perfect society for the true, hardworking Americans who just happen to be White. It worked. Pandering to Southern Whites helped Nixon win, even though Wallace was a bit of a spoiler.

Could there be a better example of super-rich arrogance than the image of millionaire Romney donors partying on a mega-yacht registered — for tax avoidance reasons — in the Cayman islands… during the Republican convention? Come on — simply as metaphor, the very notion reeks so egregiously of entitlement and elitism that one can’t imagine Romney’s campaign managers allowing such a thing to happen. Right?

But ABC News has the scoop, and it’s a good one:

Gov. Mitt Romney’s campaign toasted its top donors Wednesday aboard a 150-foot yacht flying the flag of the Cayman Islands…. The event, attended by no more than 50 people, along with Romney relatives, including older brother Scott, appeared on no public calendars…. The Cracker Bay is owned by Gary Morse, developer of the Villages retirement community. Companies controlled by Morse gave nearly $1 million to the pro-Romney Restore Our Future superPAC. Registered in the Caymans, the Cracker Bay has an impressive art collection and can seat 30 for dinner….

Russell Pearce, a Romney backer and fellow mormon, seems to have come to the end of his political career. Pearce had a starring role in Arizona’s “driving while brown” anti-immigration law, the law that Romney said should be “a model for the nation.”

Pearce’s latest bid for office failed.

…The final humiliation, though, came just days later when campaign signs for Pearce went up all around his district bragging of an honor he received from a conservative education group. “Golden Apple Award for Eduction,” the signs said, misspelling the word education….

I confess, I only watched about 4 minutes of one of the speeches. I turned it off and then had to explain to my family why I was yelling “Liar! Goddamn Fucking Liar!” at the TV.
Later, during my musical cool-down period, I killed the volume and flipped back to MSNBC’s coverage. It was surreal, listening to metal and watching Anne Romney’s strident, anger-filled face.

Oh, and was I the only one sitting there waiting for Christie to slap a scottish bonnet on his head and point at someone in the audience and yell “Get in Mah Belly!”

Just wondering… if I use one of the six daily Godwins I allow myself on Rand Paul (Ultra-right politics claiming to transcend two-party structure? Embracing of kitsch and nostalgia as a mission statement? Using Pavlovian fear of socialism as a bludgeon against progressives? Hello?!), do I get called out for fascist-thug-shaming?